Sacred Custodians of the Earth? Women, Spirituality, and the Environment

13
Children of the Gods:
The Quest for Wholeness in
Contemporary Paganism

Amy Simes

The last line of a well-known invocation commonly used in
modern Pagan ritual goes, ‘For the earth is our mother, the sky
our father, and we are the children of the gods.’1 This invocation is
traditionally said at the beginning of a ritual in order to establish
one’s relative position in the cosmos, and to remind those assembled of how all things are related – earth to sky, male to female,
humans to nature, and humans to gods as well. It is also a typical
example of one of contemporary Paganism’s main tenets; that in all
things, as in nature, there exists a polarity or complementary
relationship between two extremes which, when balanced in
combination with one another, results in a sacred and holistic creative force. Thus in Pagan ritual, as in Pagan lifestyles, both the
masculine and feminine are honoured and held in equal esteem.
This view of holism is commonly put into practice on a daily level
in order to help restore and re-establish an ecological and social
balance in the modern world.2

Paganism as a newly emerging (or re-emerging) religion in the
twentieth century has been described simply as a religion of ‘those
who honour the earth’.3 To most modern Pagans who have
embraced the idea that the earth is a living organism, there has
been an equal embracing of the notion that the earth is feminine.
Thus to love the earth is to love the feminine, and all things of an
earthly or feminine nature. Often this feminine association is
expressed in terms of a goddess or goddesses, and thus the earth
is frequently thought of as ‘Mother Earth’. Even when the goddess

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